We did an assessment, the Government of Canada actually led an assessment, and the report was released in 2011 that demonstrated that Asian carp could have a pretty devastating impact on the Great Lakes. Simply put, we have to keep them out.
Right now, there's a lot of debate going on here within the U.S. Of course, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers released a report called “The Great Lakes and Mississippi River Interbasin Study” on January 6. They identified eight alternatives for stopping the spread of invasive species between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River Basin, and vice versa.
The focus is obviously on stopping the Asian carp from coming up the Mississippi, as you noted. Most people who are engaged in that debate say that they believe, and there's some science to support it, that there has to be a physical divide, that the natural divide that existed before the artificial canal was put in...[Technical difficulty--Editor]. That comes with some significant problems. If you do that, you certainly aggravate some flooding situations that we have in Chicago. There's a commercial waterway that would be impacted by that.
A lot of the discussion now is about what you can do if you don't have a physical divide. That's where most of the energy is going right now. Looking at better locks systems and through more effective technology, more effective electrical barriers, can we exploit the development of that newer technology to keep them out?
I think we have to be optimistic at this point. Because the population front is about 60 to 70 miles from our barrier and they are not advancing that quickly, we can use a little bit of time here to come to an interim solution that's going to satisfy all the users. But the clock is definitely ticking. I'm glad there is as much attention on this as there is because we do need to find a solution very quickly.